EXCLUSIVE: MOF Officials Testify Sagawa Ordered Tampering

June 4, 2018

Tokyo- Japanese Ministry of Finance officials have testified that then senior official Nobuhisa Sagawa instructed them to falsify documents related to a controversial state land sale to Moritomo Gakuen, Jiji Press learned Saturday.

Sagawa saw problems with Moritomo-related documents to which seals had been affixed, and said, "Check again closely what is written in them," according to the testimony made during the ministry's probe into the tampering scandal.

The officials claimed that Sagawa, then director-general of the ministry's Financial Bureau, gave an instruction to carry out document falsification through the remark, informed sources said.

The ministry is set to release on Monday the results of the investigation, which is mainly based on hearings with ministry officials. It will also punish those involved in the falsification.

The ministry has been conducting the probe since the document problem came to light in March this year.

Through the investigation, the ministry has found that the Financial Bureau doctored the documents to ensure consistency with what Sagawa said at the Diet, the country's parliament, the sources said.

The land sale to school operator Moritomo Gakuen, made at a huge discount, emerged as a scandal in February last year. From that time, then bureau head Sagawa attended many Diet meetings to defend the deal.

As he made explanations, the difference between what he said and what was actually written in the documents widened. Sagawa and other bureau leaders instructed junior officials to revise the documents, the sources said.

The leaders used indirect expressions, but Sagawa checked the falsification work, according to the sources.

More than 300 sections of the documents were altered, including those related to negotiations on the land deal between the ministry and Moritomo Gakuen and those showing the name of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's wife, Akie.

The ministry also started discarding records of the negotiations after Sagawa told the Diet that the records had been disposed of in accordance with a ministry rule on storage periods for documents.

Sagawa and other senior officials asked their subordinates why the records were still kept at the ministry even after the storage period for them, the sources said.

The ministry views this as an effective instruction to discard the documents, the sources added.

In the controversial deal, the ministry sold the land plot in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, western Japan, to Moritomo Gakuen in 2016 at a discount of some 800 million yen from its assessed value to help the group cover costs to remove waste buried at the site,

Also in the in-house investigation, ministry officials said the huge discount was given in order to prevent the school operator from seeking damages from the state, after more waste was found buried, the sources said.

Moritomo Gakuen was to open an elementary school at the site, but gave up the plan after coming under fire over the land deal. The prime minister's wife was once appointed honorary principal of the planned school. Jiji Press